Dear Bob ... Six months ago, I took over as CIO of a thirty-something member IT department. One of the managers reporting to me thought he should have been promoted to this job instead (I was brought in from the outside). I took your advice for this situation and had the you-have-to-be-my-strongest-supporter session with him, and I thought it had worked. But I learned yesterday that in a recent staff m Dear Bob …Six months ago, I took over as CIO of a thirty-something member IT department. One of the managers reporting to me thought he should have been promoted to this job instead (I was brought in from the outside).I took your advice for this situation and had the you-have-to-be-my-strongest-supporter session with him, and I thought it had worked. But I learned yesterday that in a recent staff meeting he shared his strong disagreement with a difficult decision we had to make, and in rather enthusiastic terms. So now what do I do? He’s a valuable, hard-working employee who knows a lot about our systems and organization. And I don’t want to get a reputation for punishing disagreement. On the other hand, he undercut me pretty badly and I can’t just let it slide.Can I?– Tired and frustrated Dear Tired …You aren’t looking for advice. You’re looking for an accomplice. You know exactly what you have to do, which is to fire his posterior (and the rest of his anatomy) without further delay. This guy isn’t a leader. He has to get his way or he whines in public. That’s acceptable in an individual contributor … barely … but certainly not in a manager, especially when you made it clear exactly what he needed to do to succeed, and he committed to doing it.So fire him without regret. Your public explanation is that he left to pursue other interests. Leave it to him to tell everyone you fired him to retaliate for publicly disagreeing with your decision, which he probably will. Don’t worry about it – most people will understand you fired him for deliberately trying to embarrass you by publicly disagreeing with your decision after it was made. The rest will fault you no matter what you do. What is important is the discussion you have with your remaining managers. After the departure of your problem child, meet with the rest of them and say something like this. “As you’ve probably heard, ‘Ralph’ is leaving the company to pursue other interests. I know the scuttlebutt is that I fired him for disagreeing with a recent decision. I’m not going to comment on that.”“What I do want to discuss is whether it’s safe to disagree with me, because that’s important in how we work together. The answer is pretty simple, and it’s a principle I’d like all of you to adopt as well with your teams: The time to disagree is before we make a decision, not after. Our responsibility as leaders is to encourage open discussion and explore all reasonable alternatives. Once the decision has been made, whether it’s the decision you personally would have preferred or not, the time for disagreement is over – now it’s time to talk about how to best make it work.”“There might, in the future, be a good and valid reason to revisit the decision. That’s fine – if so I expect you to raise the subject in those terms, with me, respectfully. But that’s a different matter.” “Now … before we consider this to be a decision, let’s talk it through to make sure we all understand it the same way, and to make sure it’s the best way for us to lead this organization.”– Bob ——– Technology Industry